In November 2009, I first heard about the Ontario “Provincial Benefit.”

The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) states: “The Provincial Benefit ensures reliability by providing adequate generating capacity for Ontario. It accounts for differences between the spot market price and the rates paid to regulated and contracted generators. As a result, its value may be positive or negative, depending on the fluctuation of prices in the spot market.”

In other words, if Ontario pays more to your electricity supplier than the market price, you pay the difference, otherwise, you receive a credit.

Here are the average annual provincial benefits I calculated from 2005-2010 to date, in cents per kilowatt-hour, from the IESO’s monthly numbers:

It’s no accident that I didn’t hear about it until 2009. That’s the year the “benefit” exploded in cost to around half of the price of the first 1000 kWh of electricity. It’s been Orwellian since its inception, with the potential to be a charge, not a benefit, and has since been a charge every year since 2006.

On Thursday, November 5, 2009, I sent the following email to Bob Kincaid, host of “Head On with Bob Kincaid” on the Head On Radio Network (H.O.R.N.), and I thank him for addressing it, by reading it on the air that evening, starting at 16:00.

I became a listener in mid-2006, and listened regularly until early 2009. He did such a great job excoriating the Bush administration for their deliberate and repeated assaults on the Constitution, and informed me of things I wouldn’t have otherwise heard about, such as now Attorney-General Eric Holder’s representation of Chiquita International, on accusations of supporting a terrorist group, which they admitted to and paid a $25 million fine in 2007.

I was concerned that, in my view, the U.S. was headed down the same path that President Bush had taken it down, despite the window dressing looking very different. It’s not about Democrat or Republican. They are two wings of the same bird of prey. I hope that more people will see the evidence for this, as events continue to unfold under President Obama, who campaigned under the slogan of “change.”

Bob,

On yesterday’s show you blamed Republicans for killing any meaningful health care reform, but with the Democrats having a comfortable majority in the House, even excluding the so-called Blue Dogs, and a theoretical filibuster-proof Democratic caucus majority in the Senate, it’s clear who’s to blame for this failure — “Democrats.”

I agree with the meaning and tone of all the chastisements you’ve ever made about Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman. Lieberman never should have been allowed to continue caucusing with the Democrats once he endorsed McCain for president, and therefore the Democrats could never have been said to have a filibuster-proof majority in actuality until they had one without relying on him. But what about the other nine Democrats? One need look no further to cast blame than so-called Democrats.

After all, despite a bi-partisan committee majority supporting Dennis Kucinich’s single-payer option for states amendment, it was taken out by the (Democratic) House ‘leadership’ last Thursday, and that rightly had Dennis fuming.

On November 8, 2006, Michael “Mish” Shedlock was on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, to give his economic forecast.

He said an inverted yield curve for U.S. treasury bonds (e.g. the 6-month bond had a higher yield than a 10-year bond did), and a decline in housing starts and permits was the best predictor of an impending recession. They have predicted an impending recession every time since 1959.

He correctly predicted that the U.S. would be in a recession in 2008. It officially started in December 2007.

Americans had a negative savings rate since 2005. By February 2007, Americans had a negative savings rate for 21 consecutive months.

He sold a 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom house in Danville, Illinois for $14,000. A friend of his said a comparable house in Washington, D.C. would have sold for around $200k.

By 2006, Japan had experienced 18 consecutive years of declining real estate prices.

The major Japanese stock exchange index, the Nikkei 225, went from a high of around 40,000 to a low of around 7,000. Specifically, a high of 38,957 on December 29, 1989 to a low of 7,021 on March 10, 2009 — a decline of 82% over nearly 20 years.